With a curse of frustration, Conny dropped the leash and took a step forward, trusting that Remy would follow.
And she let out a surprised yelp when she felt sharp teeth sinking into her flesh.
She stared down at her right calf in amazement. He wasn’t playing—Remy almost never played, and certainly not when he was on duty—this was a bite, strong enough to break the skin.
She felt a stab of pain and let out a grunt, stooping to retrieve Remy’s leash.
The dog began to pull on her leg and the pain spiked high enough to make her gasp.
“What the fuck, Remy?”
Remy whined and opened his jaws, the sudden release almost dumping Conny on her butt. He bumped his nose into her leg a couple of times and then bit again, gently this time, but persuasively, trying to pull her in the opposite direction to the one that Porter and the others had taken.
She focused on the distant group of flashlights. The others already looked far away, moving at a sprint. They would be around the bend and out of sight in moments. She wasn’t one of the officers carrying a walkie-talkie. If she got separated from the group and somehow her flashlight failed…
She patted at her pockets.
She’d left her phone on the dashboard of the van.
Dammit, Remy!
Once more, she reached down to grab Remy’s leash, intending to haul him along on his belly if necessary, and the tunnel behind her echoed to a sound that made her blood chill in her veins.
A hideous screech; a sound no human throat could possibly produce.
That’s not terrorists, Conny thought bleakly. It’s something else.
In the distance, Chief Superintendent Porter opened fire.
They all did.
The roaring guns spat gobs of light onto the tunnel walls, and Remy’s plaintive whining became a frantic growl. He grabbed the cuff of her trousers firmly and yanked hard, but for a moment, all Conny could do was stand and stare numbly at the distant firefight. She saw no sign of return fire; just a group of police officers emptying their weapons into the darkness.
For several seconds, the thunder of the guns ricocheted from the tunnel walls, and then, in the distant, swirling pool cast by a half-dozen flashlights, she caught a glimpse of something; heard a dreadful skittering.
It moved fast, galloping along the underside of the fucking ceiling and launching itself at Porter.
Cutting through him like his body was made of smoke.
Conny watched the distant figure of the Chief Superintendent fall, and the tunnel filled with the noise of screaming; of wet ripping. She saw another figure collapse. Yet another—incredibly; impossibly—appeared to stuff the barrel of his G36 into his mouth and pepper the wall behind him with the contents of his own skull.
All of a sudden, Conny felt the pressure of Remy’s jaws on her calf ease, and she knew what that meant. The dog had done his best to persuade her to run, but had decided the time had come for him to flee or die. He ran with a pitiful, apologetic whine.
More gunfire behind her. It looked like there were only five of them left now, and a couple were shooting wildly; hitting nothing. A hideous scream rattled along the tunnel, and another of Conny’s colleagues went down hard, slammed into the ground by something that exited the shadows only for an instant.
It was all happening too fast.
I’m going to die down here.
With a glance at the Glock that now seemed tiny and insignificant in her hand, Conny took the only option available. She couldn’t die. Not before Logan did.
She turned away from the horror, following Remy’s lead.
Running for her life.
21
It wasn’t following.
Either it was too busy tearing the rest of the police apart, or it hadn’t noticed Conny and Remy hanging back further down the tunnel. Maybe it just didn’t care. Perhaps it already had more than enough meat, and saw no pressing reason to chase after one retreating human and her dog.
Coward.
The word burned hot in Conny’s mind. Her decision to flee had been instinctive, but that simply made it all the worse. It meant that despite all her years of training and experience, there had always been a danger threshold at which she would just turn and run, abandoning her duty. She had never been afraid of anything, not like this. When the creature had appeared, she hadn’t thought about the safety of her colleagues or her oath as a police officer; only her certainty that her own death was imminent, and that her obligation to her dying son outweighed all others.
She ran without thought even for her direction, focusing only on maintaining her balance on the uneven tunnel floor; on putting one foot in front of the other and opening up as much distance between her and that thing as possible.
What the fuck was it?
An animal?
If so, it moved like no animal that Conny had ever seen. In the brief glimpse she had managed to catch of the creature, it had clung to the ceiling like some gigantic spider, yet when it had dropped among the police officers, scattering them like a bomb threat, she was sure she had also seen it walking upright, just like a human. The brief snapshots her eyes had taken made no sense. Something as large as a bear, but wiry. Something that seemed to be made of teeth and claws.
Her mind ran to old horror movie scenarios. Maybe someone had dumped toxic waste into the sewer system, and some ordinary critter had been mutated into a hideous monster. London’s very own Godzilla; crawling through the city’s ancient basement, killing all who came across it.
Even in her heightened state of fear and confusion, that didn’t ring true to Conny. If there were some dangerous animal living in the Underground, surely it would have been discovered years ago. But if it had successfully avoided discovery, why suddenly start killing people en masse now?
And how could this impossible creature have taken people from multiple stations in such a short space of time?
Because there is more than one. Maybe a lot more.
The answer uncoiled in Conny’s mind, and she knew there was truth in it instinctively.
She slowed a little and hissed at Remy to stop. The dog looked back at her, wide-eyed, with an expression that Conny thought clearly conveyed are you fucking crazy, human?
The thought of fleeing, only to run headlong into more of the creatures was too terrifying to contemplate. Remy had sensed the thing long before it had appeared—either through its scent or the awful skittering noise it made as it moved—and it seemed unlikely that he would lead her straight into trouble, but panic was beginning to sink its claws into Conny’s mind, muddying her thoughts. She found it hard to think of much beyond the fact that the dark tunnels could be teeming with monsters, and the only light she had was the tiny, hopelessly inadequate bulb mounted beneath the barrel of the Glock.
Every time she took the weak spotlight off Remy to ensure that she wasn’t about to trip over some piece of debris or loose cable, she feared that he would continue to run, leaving her alone with the menacing shadows.
“Remy,” she whispered, more sternly this time, and he pulled up with a soft grunt.
His willingness to stop had to be a good sign, at least. If there were more of the monsters in the Underground system, they couldn’t be nearby. He trotted back and prodded her with his nose again, but Conny shook her head and put her hands on her knees, panting for air.
With adrenaline coursing through her, she had run faster and further than she thought possible. The pause gave birth to a raging inferno in her hamstrings, and suddenly she could feel the pain in her calf where Remy had bitten her.
“I need a minute, Rem.”
Remy tilted his head inquisitively, but seemed content enough to hold their position.
Stopping didn’t just give Conny time to feel pain and fatigue. It also afforded her an opportunity to think, but all her mind threw at her was guilt. She had stood and watched her colleagues being butchered, and then had fled, leaving the rest to die. She tried to tell herself th
at there was nothing she could have done; that most of the group were carrying weapons far more powerful than her handgun, and those weapons hadn’t made a blind bit of difference.
I could have tried. Should have done something.
And then I’d be dead, too.
The remorse building inside her made Conny feel like screaming at herself in rage, and she gritted her teeth and swallowed back the urge. The time for self-recrimination was later. Right now, she had more pressing concerns.
Like, where the hell am I?
She summoned up a mental map of the tube system. After departing Euston, it should not have taken this long for her to reach the next station, King’s Cross St Pancras. Those two weren’t far apart. In fact, now that she came to think about it, she judged that she should have been damn close to St Pancras while Porter and the others had still been alive, yet she had run for several minutes without seeing a sign of either lights or platforms.
No sound of gunfire, either, she thought. That’s the good news.
The bad news was that she was almost certainly in a service tunnel, or one that was not in regular use. There were plenty of abandoned tunnels all over the network; even some entire stations that had been left to gather dust. At that moment, even the sight of one of those so-called ghost stations would have been welcome. Anything would be better than the clammy claustrophobia of the tunnels.
I’m lost.
Instinctively, Conny began to play the Glock’s light around her in a wide arc, hoping some sign or other means of identifying her location might have been helpfully left in the tunnel. There was nothing, save for featureless steel doors set into the wall at regular intervals.
The doors had to lead to maintenance areas, she guessed. Maybe even access points that would offer a route to the surface? Perhaps she could find a stairway leading up; hell, even a ladder would do. If necessary, she would find some way to carry Remy. All that mattered now was getting out of the tunnels quickly, and warning whoever was in charge at ground level that they needed to pull out of the Underground system; making sure that whatever was happening, it stayed below the surface, as far away from London Bridge Hospital—and from Logan—as possible.
She tried the radio clipped to her shoulder, but received no reply beyond a meaningless blast of static that sounded impossibly loud. Porter hadn’t been kidding: this far underground, the radio was useless.
She paused for a moment, listening intently. Could she hear something screeching in the distance, the noise muted by thick stone walls? Had whatever was out there heard her trying her radio?
If so, maybe it, too, was holding its breath; listening. She could hear only silence.
Conny grimaced. She felt hopelessly exposed in the tunnel, especially whenever she flicked on the under-barrel light on the gun. The doors had to offer a better option.
“Come on, Rem. We need to find a way out.”
Remy huffed softly.
*
The first door she tried was locked, but the second swung open at her touch.
Her heart sank.
It was just a junction room, no more than that. One of many meeting places for the thousands of miles of heavy cable that ran below the city like a vast spiderweb. The room was empty, and there was no other exit. There was no deadbolt on the door, but she saw a few lengths of rebar just like the one Adam Trent had crushed skulls with. She could wedge one of them against the door, and at least she would have a place to hunker down and feel safe for a while.
Coward.
She headed back into the tunnel.
Froze.
This time she definitely did hear screeching, and it sounded like it was in the same tunnel. Distant, but sharing a space with her.
It has finished with the others.
Now, it is hunting me down.
She flicked off the light immediately, and began to slide along the wall, feeling for the metal doors; listening to the pounding of her heart and praying it was the only thing she would hear.
Remy began to tug on the leash, urging her to move quicker.
She reached the third door.
Locked.
As was the fourth.
When she was halfway to the fifth door, the thing in the tunnel screeched again, and Conny almost screamed an answer. It was closer. Much closer.
She gritted her teeth, terrified of falling in the darkness, knowing that if she turned on the light she would paint a target on herself.
Click…click, click.
Blank terror soaked through Conny’s mind, and she might have broken down altogether had her hand not found the door handle.
She twisted and felt tears of relief sting her eyes.
It wasn’t locked.
Unable to breathe, she hurtled through the door behind Remy, closing it quietly.
She felt around for a deadbolt, and again found none. If there was something in the room for her to use to blockade the door, she didn’t dare turn on her light to see it.
How well could the monster see in the dark? The question ripped through Conny’s mind like shrapnel. If the things lived beneath ground level, it stood to reason that they would be able to see pretty well in the dark. But how well?
If it saw me…
Conny pressed her ear to the door, and heard the strange tapping sound the creature made as it approached. It moved forward and then paused, almost like it was searching for something, before moving on again.
If it had seen her, her chance of survival would be determined by her physical strength; whether she could hold the door shut if the thing in the tunnel began to push from the other side. That did not seem likely.
Click.
Her eyes widened.
Right outside.
Click.
Conny clamped a hand over her mouth, praying that Remy would not make a sound. She didn’t dare to look down at the dog. Didn’t dare to move a muscle, afraid that even the slightest noise would give away her position.
For a sickening eternity, Conny stood at the door, listening.
And the clicking began again, growing fainter. Moving further away.
After a long time, Conny allowed herself to breathe again, and she flicked her light on, glancing at Remy. He stared up at her with wide, frightened eyes, visibly trembling. She scratched reassuringly at his ears, wishing there was someone who might scratch hers.
She swept the light from right to left and took in her surroundings: the room wasn’t really a room at all; just the entrance to a small service corridor which she figured probably connected two of the main tunnels. The corridor ended at a short set of steps leading up to another door.
She peered at it uncertainly. On the one hand, putting another door between herself and the clicking thing in the tunnel seemed like the best idea anyone could ever possibly have; on the other, the corridor looked very old and little-used. There was every chance it would lead her even further away from civilization.
“What do you think, Rem? Is this a way out?”
Remy didn’t appear to hear her.
He was staring back at the door that Conny had just shut.
Conny’s jaw clenched, and she knelt next to the dog, placing her hand on his powerful shoulders. Remy’s heart was pumping like a jackhammer.
“What do you hear?” Conny lowered her voice to a whisper.
Remy tilted his head, ears twitching.
And then he began to back away from the steel door.
It was all the persuasion that Conny required.
“Come on, Rem, let’s go.”
*
It didn’t take long to cross the corridor; certainly not long enough for Conny to believe it could possibly offer a way out of the tunnels. She prayed that the steel door at the far end would not be locked, trying not to picture the result if it was: trapped in a dead-end corridor, with only the tunnel she had just fled from as an exit.
When she reached the door, she flicked off her light once more and put a calming hand on the back of Remy’
s neck. Wincing, she grabbed the cool steel handle and twisted gently, letting out a soft sigh of relief as the door opened, and stale air washed over her.
And not just air.
To her right, the impenetrable darkness melted away, and was replaced by a soft orange glow.
Light.
It was one of the missing Tube trains, sitting silently on the track like some eerie museum exhibit. The typical surgical-white lighting of the carriages was gone, and in its place there was what she guessed were emergency lights. The train must have suffered some sort of mechanical failure.
She dropped her eyes to Remy.
He was staring at the train curiously, but he looked relaxed enough.
Conny headed toward the train, keeping her gun levelled, scanning for movement. Approaching from the front, she had a long time to stare at the smashed front windows, and the torn corpse draped across them. A vast dark stain blossomed beneath the prone body of the driver, almost covering the nose of the train.
When she drew parallel with the front of the train, she peeked through the open door. The driver’s controls had been smashed in, and the cab was a tangled web of ripped cabling and smashed circuit boards. It almost looked like the work of one of the creatures; a frenzied, animal attack. But why?
To disable the lights?
It made no sense. The things were animals, weren’t they? Or monsters? She had no trouble believing that the creatures could have smashed their way into the train and killed the driver, but how would they know how to cut the lights…and why would they even bother? Without the driver, the passengers were sitting ducks, lights or no lights. If a group of armed police couldn’t fight one of them, a bunch of terrified commuters trapped inside a stopped train would have stood no chance.
Despite that certainty, Conny’s attempts to steel herself for what the rest of the train might contain fell short.
Way short.
A glimpse through the smashed windows of the first carriage was enough for Conny to truly grasp that what was happening in the tunnels below London really was far above her paygrade. Shit, it had to be above everybody’s.
The Adrift Trilogy: The Black River Page 41